Sunday, March 11, 2012

Goldilocks and the three instructional objectives

I'd never put too much thought into Goldilocks before other than recognizing the oddness of the blond girl thinking she can get away with breaking and entering. But if you can get past that it's actually an academically packed story. The more I get into my Goldilocks unit the more I realize I can actually milk out of this simple story. So of course I am trying to take every advantage.
First of all it's a simple familiar story that is easy for them to retell. It encourages interaction with the text with the repetitive "whose been eating my food?" line and the voices are just fun for the kids to make. The beginning, middle, and end is pretty simple too.
Then there is the whole measurement piece of comparing the bears' sizes. Over and over again we are reminded of the size difference, which fits right into our kindergarten measurement unit on lining up objects by size. So we are comparing sizes of bears, bowls, beds, chairs, and then bears again. We are measuring with non-standard units so we are using manipulatives to measure stuffed bears and predicting whether momma bear will have more or less blocks than papa bear. Some of my little ones have iep goals to recognize the big object when given two choices- Goldilocks is like the original teacher of big/little.

Then we've got a whole unit on opposites. The porridge is hot or cold, the chairs are hard or soft. The bears are big or little. Tall or short.
Rhyming is a bit of a stretch but it can be done- bears/chairs. A couple of 3 bears versions I found are written in rhyme so I can throw that in too.

Then there is the emotional component. There are the happy walking bears, sad baby bear, angry papa bear, and scared Goldilocks. It's perfect for basic identification of emotions that some of my kids need.
-Hmmm Papa Bear's eyes are squinted and his mouth his open. Ever seen Ms Lipstick look like that? Yeah, that is what people look like when they are angry.

Now that we've identified the emotional component our next step is going to be to write an anger-management book for Papa Bear. Although yes, Papa Bear may want to be angry enough at Goldilocks to eat her, well, let's see what else he can do. Take deep breaths?  Take a break? Ask Goldi to never do that again? Get a drink of water?

And then there is the 'don't take things that don't belong to you' lesson. Why is Papa Bear mad? People get mad when we take their things. Let's practice asking first- if Goldi had just asked then maybe they'd all be friends.

I'm sure as the unit goes on I'll find more areas where we can milk it for all it's worth. We're making a mural that includes a retelling component, interactive writing, ordering objects from longest to shortest or shortest to longest, and of course just enjoying being artistic.

I have a feeling I'm going to be very, very sick of Goldilocks when this is all over.

2 comments:

magpie said...

Something tells me you won't be incorporating Angry Bird and Brown bear into the tale ♥☺♥

jwg said...

Did you know that someone wrote a wonderful sequel? Goldilocks grows up to be a locksmith and attempts to atone for what she did to the bears. It's called "Goldilocks Returns" and is by Lisa Campbell. Now you can work on prediction skills.